Black
and White
(Under
age 40? You won't understand.)
You
could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread
the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull
a chair up to the TV set,
"Good
Night, David. Good Night, Chet."
Depending
on the channel you tuned,
You
got Rob and Laura - or Ward and June.
It
felt so good. It felt so right.
Life
looked better in black and white.
I
Love Lucy, The Real McCoys,
Dennis
the Menace, the Cleaver boys,
Rawhide,
Gunsmoke, Wagon Train,
Superman,
Jimmy and Lois Lane.
Father
Knows Best, Patty Duke,
Rin
Tin Tin and Lassie too,
Donna
Reed on Thursday night!
Life
looked better in black and white.
I
wanna go back to black and white.
Everything
always turned out right.
Simple
people, simple lives...
Good
guys always won the fights.
Now
nothing is the way it seems,
In
living color on the TV screen.
Too
many murders, too many fights, I wanna go back to black and white.
In
God they trusted, alone in bed they slept,
A
promise made was a promise kept.
They
never cussed or broke their vows.
They'd
never make the network now.?
But if I could, I'd rather be
In
a TV town in '53.
It
felt so good. It felt so right.
Life
looked better in black and white.
I'd trade all the channels on the satellite,
If
I could just turn back the clock tonight
To
when everybody knew wrong from right.
Life
was better in black and white!
Another
Goody For The Oldtimers
My
Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board
with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.
My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter
AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in
wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in icepack coolers, but I can't remember
getting e.coli.
Almost all of us would have rather gone
swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach
closures then.
The term cell phone would have conjured up a
phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.
We all took gym, not PE... and risked permanent
injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having
cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light
reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because
they tell us how much safer we are now.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and
sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all
sorts of negative attention.
We
must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had
then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.
I
thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be
proud of myself.
I just can't recall how bored we were without
computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.
We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel
left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the
48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting
like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.
Now
it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle
of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for
leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either
because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked
again when we got home.
I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming
over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little
did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him
up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.
To top it off, not a single person I knew had
ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we
possibly have known that?
We
needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were
obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that
the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?
LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO
ALL WHO DIDN'T- SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING
